Miller Magazine Issue 137 May 2021

75 TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM MILLER / may 2021 a postdoctoral degree at Harvard for six years. In that period, I focused on the subject of “Antibody pro- duction through synthetic methods and determining the structures of proteins in atomic resolution”. Antibody pro- duction is a technology that finds applications for differ- ent diseases and cancer in particular. However, during my studies, I began to take an interest in other fields as well. So, I strived to better and improve myself in the subjects such as protein production and purification via recombi- nant ways, including the proteins, vaccines, and enzymes as well. Currently, I continue to serve as the Vice Director of the Life Sciences and Biotechnology Institute at Bezmi- alem Vakif University, and as the Founder CEO at LIVZYM Biotechnologies. You are also one of the founders of the Life Sciences and Biotechnology Institute at Bezmialem University. What made you establish the institute and what does the university mean in your career? My decision to return to my homeland is one of the land- marks in my life. I would like to mention once again that I am so grateful to my dear friends who encouraged me in taking this decision and I will always remember them with praise. I returned to the country in 2014 to lead the reverse brain drain with a drive from the support of the people around me and I focused on the establishment of the Bio- technology Institute within Bezmialem Vakif University. Under the auspices of our Chairman of the Board of Trustees and our Rector and with their strong support in this respect, we managed to found an institute where we can truly reflect the practices of successful examples in the world. We have the laboratories we built with an investment of over ₺ 40 million funded by our universi- ty, where 10 academic researchers who studied at the world’s leading universities such as MIT, Stanford and Johns Hopkins are employed. In this way, we managed to import valuable people with a good command of biotech- nology, from abroad to our country. So, you founded the first and only Biotechnology R&D factory in the Middle East and Africa. What can you tell us about the purpose and story behind the foundation of LIVZYM Biotechnologies? My mind had already been occupied with the questions, “What can be produced biotechnologically in Turkey, what is actually needed in this field and how can I contribute to my country?”, ever since the years of doctoral stud- ies. I noticed in the research I conducted in the following years within the framework of these questions, that Turkey imported 150 million dollar worth of industrial enzymes, approximately. The enzyme market, which is needed by almost every industry and sector, has a share of 2 bil- lion dollars regionally and 10 billion dollars globally. On the other hand, our country imports all of what it needs. There is no industrial enzyme producer across the region from North Africa all the way to Russia. We came up with